Daily Archives: August 3, 2009

So last Tuesday I said I would start tracking how many links I sent to mainstream media sites (for the purposes of this test I’m not including other blogs) and how much that translated to in terms of ad revenue. For purposes of simplicity I’m using a $.05 CPM rate here. For some sites that’s going to be more, for some less, but it’s a nice solid number and I figured if anything it erred on the side of underestimation.

So here’s the results for links shared between 7/28 and 7/31 – four days.

Number of links shared: 25

Clicks to those links (according to Bit.ly): 185

185 X $.05: $9.25

Those 25 links were shared by others and, just looking at their Bit.ly stats, not other URL shortners or other direct links, resulted in 3,002 other clicks. Using the same multiplier, that’s another $150 in ad revenue.

Now I’m a pretty small fish in the internet pond. So I’d love to see bigger blogs run this same type of tracking and see how much, exactly, we contribute to the revenue of those publications.

Now that’s dependent, though, on publications continuing to do a couple of things:

Making their sites searchable so that my Google News keyword search feeds continue to include their stories.

Continuing to not require payment for online access so that I can continue to link to them without having to shell out money for it myself or warn my readers that they can’t read it unless they pony up.

Again, I want these pubs to make money since they do what I – and a lot of people – can’t in terms of reporting and resourcing. But the way I can support them right now is by sending them traffic that they can translate to ad revenue and not through direct payment. Don’t stop me from helping you.